Corruption in
International Relations
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- That President
Bill Clinton, commander-in-chief of the world's one
remaining superpower, might dare to risk his country's self-
interest in financial and political prudence by personally
wooing monetary support for his re-election bid from
Chinese, Thai and Indonesian businessmen and women, all with
close ties to their governments, is by the yardstick of
common probity boggling to the imagination.
This is the age of what Moises Naim has called
"corruption eruption" that has shaken "every region
regardless of cultural background or Gross National
Product." The last eighteen months have seen the fall of the
Secretary-General of NATO over corruption allegations,
indictments for corruption of one-third of India's cabinet,
graft charges against Italy's most prominent post-war prime
ministers and two former South Korean presidents;
parliamentary investigations into financial abuses by the
heads of government of Colombia, Pakistan and Turkey, graft
at high levels of government in Japan, not to mention the
allegations of massive corruption against the former Mexican
president, his brother and the assistance of Citibank in
laundering the spoils. As Robert Leiken observes in a
fascinating article in Foreign Policy, "The post-Cold War
period exhibits the disillusionment and cynicism that result
when transcendent events are followed by shabby
anti-climaxes or worse. After the Glorious Revolution,
Walpole's rotten boroughs; after Lincoln, the Gilded Age;
after Wilson's Fourteen Points, the Teapot Dome Scandal;
after the fall of thr Berlin wall, this."
We appear to be surrounded and beseiged by it. Organized
international crime has mushroomed the last 30 years, partly
under the influence of the drug trade and the inept
inability of western politicians in consumer nations to face
up to the fact that the most effective way to target the
cartels is to decriminalize their product. Illicit traffic
in nuclear materials threaten our very existence, raising
the stakes in common criminality to unheard of proportions.
Yet the decision to expand NATO and thus probably forsake
the Russian ratification of the second Strategic Arms
Reduction Treaty will put Russia's nuclear bomb making
factories back in business and with it the careless
stockpiling of even more plutonium. The arms trade has
become like a chaotic fungus reaching into every nook and
cranny. A judicial inquiry last year showed how British
government ministers connived to turn a blind eye to the
arming of Saddam Hussein and there are suggestions, from
evidence as diverse as the murder of a leading socialist
politician in Belgium to the murder of a young British
investigative reporter at work in Chile, that some European
arms companies, in the urge to clinch the deal, don't even
draw the line at homicide. In Sweden, where probity is the
most prized of all virtues, a former senior executive of the
Swedish arms manufacturer, Bofors, tells a national daily
that he can't sleep at night for thinking there is some
connection between the big bribes paid by his company in
India and the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme.
The tide is sweeping in but there are those with their
brooms trying with some success to sweep it out. In India
the voters punished Prime Minister P. Narasimha Rao's
tainted government with a crushing defeat last year and in
Mexico President Ernesto Zedillo is hammering away at both
bribery and drug barons. Even in Colombia, although
allegations of having received drug money for his election
campaign still hang over President Ernesto Samper, there is
no doubt that police and justice officials are prosecuting
other malefactors with a commendable earnestness. In Brazil
popular agitation pushed parliament to depose the totally
crooked president, Fernando Collor de Mello.
Was there ever a golden age? In 1788 Edmund Burke
attacked the colonial administrator of Bengal, Warren
Hastings: "Bribery, filthy hands, a chief governor of a
great empire receiving bribes from poor, miserable, indigent
people, this is what makes government itself base,
contemptible and odious in the eyes of mankind." In early
modern Europe the sale of office was defended on the grounds
of efficiency by Montesquieu and Bentham. But if there was
never a golden age there was much less corruption in
quantity terms and it was less pervasive. The sums involved
were not sufficient to "buy" a whole government. It rarely
corrupted the integrity of a government in its foreign
dealings--the charge that Mr. Clinton is now having to
counter.
Nevertheless, in many important ways, America has a
cleaner slate than most. In the U.S. it is illegal to use
bribes in market transactions abroad. But in Germany, as in
much of Europe, if a German bribes a foreign government
official he can claim it as a tax reduction. In Britain
off-shore islands thrive on legal tax-rvasion and nameplate
addresses for aema sellers and such like.
It is simplistic to blame this on the capitalist system's
greed, or even Thatcherite-Reaganite liberalization. A
majority of capitalists are not seriously corrupt. But to
those that are governments too often turn a blind eye
because it is convenient to do so. It is governments that
have to set the standard. Voters as far apart as India,
Belgium and Brazil have made that sentiment clear. In
America, regrettably, they have missed their chance, for now
at least.
March 5, 1997,
LONDON
Copyright © 1997 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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